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Abstract
Social scientists have long struggled to develop methods adequate to their theoretical
understanding of meaning as collective and dynamic. While culture is widely understood
as an emergent property of collectivities, the methods we use keep pulling us back
towards interview-situated accounts and an image of culture as located in individual
experience. Scholars who seek to access supra-individual semiotic structures by studying
public rituals and other collectively-produced texts then have difficulty capturing
the dynamic processes through which such meanings are created and changed in situ.
To try to capture more effectively the way meaning is produced and re-produced in
everyday life, we focus here on conversational interactions-the voices and actions
that constitute the relational space among actors. Conversational journals provide
us with a method: the analysis of texts produced by cultural insiders who keep journals
of who-said-what-to-whom in conversations they overhear or events they participate
in during the course of their daily lives. We describe the method, distinguishing
it from other approaches and noting its drawbacks. We then illustrate the methodological
advantages of conversational journals with examples from our texts. We end with a
discussion of the method's potential in our setting as well as in other places and
times.